to ask your thoughts on this? Fatal shooting during burglary

[itsjustataste]

Happened near me very recently and our community seems very torn with lots of people slinging insults at both sides. Lots of people shouting about playing stupid games, win stupid prizes etc... whilst others calling the shooter a murderer.

I find it very sad that someone so young has ultimately lost their life and has got mixed up in this sort of thing.

BUT that being said, I don't have any ill feeling toward the farmer either and cannot say that I wouldn't do the same if faced with 3 people breaking into my home, especially if I had my children in the house.

The other 2 suspects arrested for aggravated burglary meaning a weapon was involved and there had been a break in at the same home the night previously too.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-68942085.amp

We don’t know the facts though. He could have just been staying there that night because of the attempted break in the day before. He’s a relative of the farm owner.

If this theory turns out be true - and who knows, it’s all just speculation at this point - I imagine legally it puts him on far shakier ground than if it was his actual
property, because it would imply he was only there with intent to stop intruders by force.

Team farmer, if someone turns up in the fashion these guys did you have no idea if they intend to harm you, clearly they are there to do something bad, are you supposed to wait to find out? Especially with kids in the house.

Frankly there seems to be more onus on ensuring criminals are protected whilst they are committing crimes. I’m at the point where I don’t give a shit if police ram people off mopeds or people who break into peoples homes get shot. These people are hardly a great loss to society. I don’t think being popular at your local pub is enough to counterbalance the harm this guy was probably causing.

I don't think I could ever kill anyone, but people should feel safe in their homes and other people should not enter them and think they can take what they like.

I second this. I wouldn’t fancy any of the posters here being on a jury! If the situation was 3 armed men in his home where his family were sleeping then shooting was most likely proportionate and most people would probably do the same. I can’t see anywhere that confirms this was the case. It sounds like it may have been linked to organised crime and there is more to the story. It’s obviously sad that a young man has lost his life. He might have been the scum of the earth, or he might have been a lad that had made a poor choice and was caught up in something he didn’t understand and out of his depth. Of course his family are going to be angry and grieving.

I'm on the farmer's side for sure.

Even if he was just staying there and not the owner there were 3 guys breaking in, you’d be terrified of what could happen you personally. In that context I’d be worried they intended to physically harm me, they had weapons.

If he was just staying there, why did he have a gun?

I’ve made lots of poor choices, none of them involved turning up at someone house in the middle of the night with a bunch of my mates.

Where in that Guardian article does it state he wasn't the farm owner? I think you're confusing the fact that another of the alleged burglars was arrested on the A6. The farmer was arrested on suspicion of murder and the bloke arrested on the A6 on suspicion of aggravated burglary. Sounds like he drove off and left his two mates there.

The go fund me page by his son states that he was a farmer working in all weathers, which would lead you to believe that he was running the farm.

It is quite common for someone to own several farms and have someone else living on them and running them. If this is the case, and like you said we don’t know the facts, then he has the right to defend his property. Property doesn’t just mean bricks and mortar.

Where in that Guardian article does it state he wasn't the farm owner?

Second paragraph.

I’ve just been reading some threads on Facebook about this. The lads shouldn’t have been there, simple.

I feel sorry for the farmer. Loads of people who know the burglars saying they were trying to take his stash of cannabis to sell it on, not sure how true that is

Maybe it’s not his gun, maybe it belongs to the farmer. Maybe because of previous attempts on the property he stayed there to reassure his family member and knew it may not be safe so brought protection with him.

If my sister had been broken into and she was scared and I offered to spend a night at hers to help out, damn right I’d make sure I had a way of protecting myself. These aren’t carol singers, they are people who have come to the property with ill intent.

Khan, the London Mayor (Labour btw) has done nothing in London to eleviate the rampant crime there. His priority is road charges it seems. I’m pretty sure Labour, if they get in next time, are not going to be tough on crime either.

It's not his family grieving him that's the issue. It's them rallying people against the farmer, who's gotten threats etc from the community.
Celebrating what he's done. Treating him like a hero.

Talk of 'deserving' is neither here nor there. Many accidents for example are caused by people driving recklessly, some even drink driving.
Did they 'deserve' to die? No.
Was their death clearly a consequence of their own stupid actions, with no need to blame anybody else? Yes.

Even the parents of paedophiles and serial rapists/killers grieve them. They don't go around telling the public how great they were. Of course burglary isn't on the surface as 'serious' a crime but it's still a crime.

Yeah his sister actually said "he's not a criminal" despite the fact he was committing a crime at the time of his death. 🤦‍♀️

Some people are so seriously self centred they can't even speak sense

You think he deserved to be gunned down and murdered? Because if you shoot at someone, you know there's an extremely high likelihood you will kill them. So there's intent when you pull the trigger. Which makes it murder.

Two wrongs, etc.

As a petite woman faced with a big guy, I think you'd be in a position to reasonably need to use a weapon against a burglar in situations when another big guy might not.

This is one of the reasons that wives who kill their husbands get longer sentences than husbands who kill their wives. Women almost always need a weapon to kill another human which is an aggravating factor whereas men can kill with their bare hands.

Instinctively on #TeamFarmer but what actually happened will come out with the investigation and it is perfectly reasonable to arrest someone in these circumstances. There is a huge range of possibilities from 3 men storming the farmhouse with guns, knives and bats and coming at the farmer while he held a newborn baby, to 3 men with bolt cutters shot in the back from 50yards away out of the farmhouse window while they tried to break into a shed and the body carried indoors and set up with weapons to look like he was an immediate threat to life. My suspicion based on absolutely nothing is they broke into the house (perhaps to steal keys) and they were threatening, did have weapons, and would have needed to in some way disable the farmer and his family in order to get away with the stuff without the police being called and the farmer had a reasonable fear of immediate threat to life. I think if it was a drug related crime non of those 3 men would ever have been heard of again.

Farmer has done society a favour, this burglar would of continued to cause misery to many hundreds more over the years to other innocent people, the media has painted the burglar as some outstanding young person for some reason, they should have published his criminal record and let the public decide how good of a person he was. Entirely his own fault for getting shot, his friends and family should realise he put himself in that position nobody else, he was 19,how was his upbringing in life to start committing crimes in his teens? Parents should be questioning themselves.

It literally says in her post, that you quoted, that he didn’t “deserve” to die…

What would you have done in this situation?

That paragraph is about the dead teenager. How have you extrapolated that the farmer wasn't the owner of the place from that?!

Don’t be a thief and it shouldn’t be a problem. You try to go into someones home you have no right to expect them to obligingly get out of your way so you can carry on. It very well could be self defence, 3 men try to break into a home with children in it whilst carrying weapons I mean yeah in that context I’d be shooting them too.

Same here. I always thought Mr Martin was treated appallingly given the circumstances. He’d been repeatedly targeted.

What situation? We don’t know what the situation was. We don’t know what the burglars were armed with, we don’t know whether they were in the farm house in which the family was sleeping, or whether they were in an outbuilding containing something worthy of stealing.

I would absolutely take any necessary means to defend myself or my family if a burglar was actually in my home. I would not attempt to defend my property with force. I would definitely not go out into an outbuilding with a rifle.